Over the October season of horror I was watching lots of classic monsters and murder flicks and my wife and I also binged on old YouTube videos from the various Joe Bob Briggs’ movie series which featured the eponymous Joe Bob presenting films like a 1990s version of classic horror hosts of the 1960s and 1970s. The best thing about Joe Bob’s shows is that his redneck persona was tempered by his Vanderbilt University education and his obviously deep and broad knowledge about cinema history. Briggs’ shows made lots of teenagers into accidental cinephiles, but he wasn’t the only smarty celebrating American trash in the grunge era.

We also stumbled across this chestnut from the same era, Reel Wild Cinema hosted by the great Sandra Bernhard. Bernhard is currently appearing as a Satanic priestess on American Horror Story: Apocalypse, but she’s never been better than she was in her turn as a whacked-out kidnapper in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy.

Here’s a whopping playlist of Bernhard and the weird and wild film series she hosted when Beck was still a loser…

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I saw My Own Private Idaho in the theater when it was released back in 1991. I mention this because the seemingly-timeless ‘Idaho simultaneously feels like a movie of its time, and of my time. In the 1990’s Generation X took over the culture: Nirvana, Bill Hicks, Tarantino. Anna Nicole Smith brought back the bombshell, and Ben Stiller had a television show on MTV. Independent movies exploded in the 1990s and a number of homegrown storytellers emerged to spotlight a crop of smart young actors like Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix. Those two looked just like our friends who were leaving college and stepping into a recessed economy where creative young people flourished on strong coffee and clove cigarettes, and decorated themselves in thrift store style. My Own Private Idaho is one of my favorite Shakespeare adaptations, it’s a great story about growing up, and I’m reminded of the movie because the 1990s most timeless film screens at midnight on Friday at the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville.

My Own Private Idaho came out in September of 1991 at the beginning of my last year in college in Michigan where I was growing my hair long, writing my first newspaper stories and living in an off-campus apartment. On Halloween night in 1993 River Phoenix died at the Viper Room in Los Angeles. He was two months younger than me. I’m a Gemini. He was a Virgo. Generation X is haunted by the Age of Aquarius and it’s inextricably linked to America’s 1960s. A generation of rockers, rebels, hedonists, hellions, and righteous rabble rousers caused our seismic cultural shift after World War II, but Generation X was the result. Manson, Kennedy, MLK, LSD, Mutually Assured Destruction – the 1990s wrapped them in cynicism, side-eyed them with suspicion, and eventually steered the culture from sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll toward satire, techno and MDMA. 90 is 60 upside down, and the more things change the more they stay the same. River was our Janis.

My Own Private Idaho tells the stories of two friends from different worlds: Mike (River Phoenix) is searching for his long lost mother. Mike is also the film’s narcoleptic narrator, and the images director Gus Van Sant creates to evoke Mike’s dreamlike reveries are the film’s visual signature. Van Sant is one of our most consistently challenging filmmakers, but ‘Idaho’s many indelible – if ineffable – frames make this movie the auteur’s most poetic. Mike and his friend Scott (Keanu Reeves) are both young prostitutes who live on the streets in the Pacific Northwest. They get picked-up by both men and women, and sometimes sleep in places like abandoned apartment buildings. They belong to an underground network of prostitutes and drug addicts who serve as a freaky foster family of runaways and throwaways. Secretly, Scott has a very different background from Mike and the other street kids, and his story borrows from Shakespeare’s “King Henry IV” and “King Henry VI.”

Cinematographers John J. Campbell and Eric Alan Edwards lens some gorgeous pictures here, but ‘Idaho’s quiet beauty is effectively contrasted against the grimy scene that Mike and Scott move through, and the angular, off-beat performances by many of the non-actors cast in the film. At one point Van Sant was planning to shoot his script using only real street kids that he knew in Portland. In the end he cast many of them as Mike and Scott’s fellow hustlers and they help to ground the film’s time-lapse tapestries in a real-feeling milieu of black coffee and blowjobs, cigarettes, sentiments and heartache.

My Own Private Idaho is a love story focused on Mike’s deep alienation and the numbness that results from his drug use and his sleep-inducing condition. Because Mike can’t find his mother and re-connect the fundamental break that defines his sense of himself, he instead simulates something like love with the strangers he engages with for money, and he projects his feelings onto those around him no matter if those feelings are appropriate or reciprocated. My Own Private Idaho is a deep, sometimes surreal vision of complex people with complex feelings trying to negotiate the connections and boundaries that define friends, family and lovers. And it’s also about the damage that can result when those connections and boundaries become confused, constraining or sometimes suddenly severed.

At one point in “King Henry IV,” Shakespeare writes about how people sometimes make decisions to transform themselves. But My Own Private Idaho reminds us that we are forever part of the people we come from, and the film’s final scenes seem to say that life is a but dream, but not a dream we get to choose or one we can wake from.

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In the early 1990′s Nirvana made a massive impact on popular music, and the band’s influence seems even more impressive when remembering that they only released three studio albums. Of course, like most artists, their official output is only part of the story of the band’s production. And fans like me are always on the lookout for more material that will help us to understand where the band was coming from or where their music might have gone if not for Kurt Cobain’s untimely death.

This week a trove of old Nirvana demo recordings was uploaded to YouTube by Tacoma rocker John Purkey who claims that the cassette tapes were given to him by Cobain himself. Uproxx offered this overview on the recordings…

On the four tapes, which feature over two hours of material, are recordings from Nirvana’s first ever studio session, at Reciprocal Studios in Seattle in 1988 with Melvins drummer Dale Crover. There are also Nevermind demos recorded with Chad Channing, who replaced Crover in the band for a brief period before himself being replaced by Dave Grohl. One of the tapes includes Montage Of Heck, which was later officially released a few years ago (although it didn’t sell super well). As that last point makes obvious, some of the material on these tapes has already been distributed on various bootlegs.

Kick out the jams here on my YouTube channel…

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I got back to Nashville late on Monday night after a week at the Sedona Summer Colony in Arizona. I spent last week writing songs, jamming with musicians and talking about movies, art and writing with artists and thinkers from around the country. It was an illuminating, immersive experience in a singularly beautiful setting and I want to thank the Tennessee Arts Commission for helping to make the colony the highlight of my summer so far.

If you follow my blog you know a bit about what was going down recently, but if you missed a post or are just catching up here’s a playlist of the videos I made to document each of my new compositions…

Traveling and re-inserting myself into my regular schedule has me starting my posts a little late this week, but I’ve been coming across lots of rad stuff to point to during my time in the desert. One discovery I made involves a new treasure trove of media from Beat luminary Allen Ginsberg. Here’s the skinny from the Stanford Library blog…

Ginsberg comes up fairly often in this blog (e.g. Rebecca Wingfield’s recent post about “Howl” going up online), but the release of over 2000+ audio cassette recordings to SearchWorks is truly another cause for celebration. These recordings represent a staggering amount of primary source material associated with the Beat Generation, the bulk of which date from the 1970s to 1990s. Once the open reel recordings and videos are completed, we’ll have one of the most comprehensive recorded outputs from a single cultural figure available for the whole world to access.

As a teaser, here’s a recording of Ginsberg and Burroughs having an afternoon conversation about art and Jack Kerouac…

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Perhaps it’s just the coming, new Twin Peaks season, but it seems that all things Northwestern, surreal and Lynchian are in the air. The most recent iteration of this wave before the flood is a recent article by Leigh Anderson which collates instances of the series appearing in video game mode…

It sure is a boom time for the odd intersection of Twin Peaks with video games. There are game-y reimaginings everywhere, and a few commercial projects in recent years pay tribute to David Lynch’s 90s mystery television: 2010′s janky but beloved Deadly Premonition went heavy on the similarities, for example. In the just-released first episode of Life is Strange, set dreamily in the Pacific Northwest, a main character’s vehicle bears the license plate “TWN PKS”.

The 1990s make a good setting in general for modern games with unconventional goals. The trend toward creating more laid-back, sentimental experiences of reading and discovery — like the nostalgic Riot Grrrl story the Portland-based Fullbright Company told in Gone Home — means lots of developers might be seeking settings where physical technology (tapes, notebooks, VHS), ripe for rifling through, intersects with poignant generational angst.

I track my young adulthood through the 1990′s and I can’t think of a better summing-up of the slacker/bohemian culture of Generation X than trying to play “modern games with unconventional goals.” Twin Peaks still appeals to my generation because it still resonates with the weird idealism of that era, and it continues to win fans because, well, we were really on to something.

Or not. Agent Cooper would never fall for the straitjacket of belief and neither will I. The spice must flow.

The Welcome to Twin Peaks site has a great breakdown on the gameplay including this anxiety inducing description that left me reaching for my joystick…

A day in the FBI was never like this before! You are Special Agent Dale Cooper and you’ve found yourself trapped inside of the Black Lodge, a surreal and dangerous place between worlds.

Try as you might, you can’t seem to find anything but the same room and hallway no matter which way you turn. Worse yet, your doppelganger is in hot pursuit! You have no choice but to keep running through the room and hallway (or is it more than one?) and above all else, don’t let your doppelganger touch you! Your extensive physical training in the FBI will provide you a seemingly limitless supply of energy to run as long as necessary, but running out of breath is the least of your worries!

I don’t have an Atari 2600 anymore and this game was never actually available as a cartridge as it wasn’t produced until 2011. That said, the game master, Jak Locke, recreates vintage gameplay here while simultaneously immersing players in a thoroughly disorienting tour of Twin Peaks’s alternative reality.

Here’s a video from inside the Black Lodge…

Read the rest of the article and download the game for yourself at the Welcome to Twin Peaks link above…

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We’re about to be submerged in the hype surrounding Virtual Reality, but it’s important to remember that we’re witnessing the second coming of VR which began its life as a cultural artifact/technological prophecy in the 1980′s and early 1990′s. Fiction authors like William Gibson, films like Lawnmower Man and magazines like Mondo 2000, gave us the words and images we needed to understand what the new technology might be capable of and this charming 1991 BBC documentary reminds us of the aesthetics that defined VR’s debut.

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The Beastie Boys are the bastard sons of the kind of b-boy/hardcore mongrel that could’ve only been born in 1981. After a short tenure as young punks inspired by Black Flag, the boys teamed up with Rick Rubin to create a metal/punk/hip-hop sound that sounded like the inside of the head of a 13 year old boy.

Three Jewish kids doing rap seemed more than a little odd in 1986 when the Boys released License to Ill and became household names on the strength of party anthems like “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!)” and “No Sleep Till Brooklyn.” The whole thing was catchy enough and the Beasties were really funny, but anyone can be forgiven for dismissing the trio as a novelty act.

Of course, groundbreaking music followed and the Beastie Boys proved to be one of the most important bands of the 1990′s and beyond. Following the cancer death of Adam Yauch/MCA in 2012, the Beasties officially called it quits although there is an autobiography project in the works, slated for a 2015 release.

Today would’ve been Adam Yauch’s 49 birthday. While you’re waiting for that new book to come out, here’s MTV’s exhaustive documentary of the band, Beastiology…

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As media becomes increasingly digitized, the vehicles for our ideas become faster and more fluid. What many people don’t realize is that they also become more fragile.

Let me give you an example: I’m combing through old recordings right now, looking for songs to add as extras to a remaster of my CD, Blue Turns Black. I’ve found digital files on disc and ADAT tapes that cannot be read or retrieved maybe nearly ten years old. However I have recordings on cassette tapes that go back to the 90′s that are still perfectly playable.

I bring up this example of how an older storage medium proves to be better than the “improvement” that displaced it in order to point your attention back to the humble floppy discs used — after cassette tapes — in early home computers. That technology is the hero in an art world story involving the discovery of an archive of digital paintings created by Andy Warhol 30 years ago. The Daily Mail explains…

Dozens of original artworks by Andy Warhol have been discovered on decaying floppy disks.
The artworks were commissioned in 1985 by pioneering home computer company Commodore, who wanted Warhol to demonstrate the graphic capabilities of its new Amiga 1000 as it went head to head with Apple’s popular Macintosh series.
Although video footage exists of the artist creating the images alongside singer Debbie Harry at the launch of the Amiga 1000, the artworks themselves were thought lost until researchers tracked down the obsolete disks within The Warhol Archive and hired a team of experts to extract the contents.

The hunt for the floppy disks began when the artist Cory Arcangel – a self-described Warhol fanatic and ‘lifelong computer nerd’ – stumbled on a YouTube video of the Amiga 1000 launch.

After discussing the footage with figures in the U.S. art scene, Arcangel was introduced to The Andy Warhol Museum’s chief archivist Matt Wrbican, who was able to track the floppy disks down.

Describing the artworks, Arcangel said: ‘In the images, we see a mature artist who had spent about 50 years developing a specific hand to eye coordination now suddenly grappling with the bizarre new sensation of a mouse in his palm held several inches from the screen.’

‘It had to be enormously frustrating, but it also marked a huge transformation in our culture: the dawn of the era of affordable home computing.’

‘We can only wonder how he would explore and exploit the technologies that are so ubiquitous today.’

Here’s that video…

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